Entertainment

TWEET SUCCESS: Why We Love Twitter's 140 Character Limit

From its very inception, Twitter faced complaints from the peanut gallery about its 140 character posting "limitation." Over time new services sprung up to address the perceived "short-coming" of the microblogging service, from TwitLonger to Maxitweet to Glide Engage: essentially Twitter with 1,400 characters.

Some folks will probably get some value out of those services, but I'm going to make the argument that Twitter is the unique and special snowflake that it is precisely because of its 140 character "limitation." If brevity is the soul of wit, we are all facing an unprecedented opportunity to be hilarious all day long. Let's not squander it!

Creative Limitations are Good

In some ways it's natural to always want more. We're an all-you-can-eat society that's always-on, and we don't take kindly to limitations in almost any form.

People had the same reaction when Flickr launched video uploads with a 90 second time constraint. At the time it seemed like 90 seconds just wasn't good enough for anything. The family reunion, junior's graduation, and cousin's wedding could simply not be uploaded to Flickr in their entirety.

And looking back on it now — aren't you glad? There is something about imposing limitations that forces us to stop, reflect, and often edit the material we're trying to share before simply hitting send (tweets about what we had for lunch or "I'm here" not withstanding!). Conversely, it helps us appreciate all the value and meaning that can be packed into a small space — whether it be language, video, or other medium.

In the case of Flickr, it didn't take long for people to take up the call and find creative new formats that really worked within the 90 second constraints. The long portrait is a style that may never have emerged without that particular constraint inside that particular culture. Promotional postcards and other new inventive formats emerged out of this constraint as well.

The same is true of Twitter. When faced with the need for an economy of language, you're forced to periodically think twice about what exactly it is you're trying to say. Sometimes it may be pointless babble, but even pointless babble has a rightful place in the pantheon of human communication. And when you really are trying to impart something meaningful in a short allotment of the human language, it can be an unexpected and valuable mental exercise that, in its own small way, helps hone your ability to communicate with your fellow humans.

Brevity Keeps Twitter Low-Obligation

We're expected to keep ahead of the overflowing inbox, the voicemail, the neverending torrent of RSS feeds, the Facebook messages, and will even occasionally get a cold shoulder if we haven't read that friend's blog post about a big life change. It's too much! Some of us who remember back when the carefree days of proto-blogging were all about fun and the pure enjoyment of connection — before the business and the advertising and the VC money came flowing in — now appreciate all the more the low-obligation social cloud that Twitter really is.

The cycle, of course, has started again — many professional bloggers and those in the tech industry and elsewhere now consider Twitter a business tool more than a social activity. Even so, I can be away from Twitter for hours on end and feel absolutely no compunction to go back and read the tweets I missed. Nor is there any social expectation to do so. That's refreshing!

Twitter is one of the few tools and social sites I use every day that I don't feel the need to "keep up with" — it's just a river of highly relevant information flowing past, and I can dip into the stream whenever I wish. It's still completely opt-in, and the sheer volume of tweets afforded by short status updates is to thank for that lack of obligation.

Signal-to-Noise Ratio is Kept Manageable

The same brevity that keeps Twitter low-obligation keeps it relatively manageable in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. Sure, there's no shortage of boring tweets you wish you hadn't read, but a) there's a cure for that and b) at most you're out what, a few seconds? Think of how many times you've gotten halfway through a long blog post before realizing it wasn't worth it. Think of how many books you've started and never finished.

At least with Twitter, you have a hard time wasting gobs of time on things that are truly uninteresting. Yes, you may "waste" time following all those links to those funny cat pictures, but that's still time "lost" to something you on some level wanted to do. Curtailing the effect of "interesting but not necessarily productive" infostreams is a different problem from trying to avoid those timesinks that leave you feeling like "that's 30 minutes of my life I'll never get back."

Moreover, people complain about the banality of Twitter enough as it is. Can you imagine how much more banality some people can fit into 1,400 characters and beyond? And the psychological overhead of having to figure out which output is worth spending time on and which isn't? Brevity can act as its own filter in that regard.

Being based inherently on the SMS length limitation ensures that Twitter works absolutely brilliantly on mobile devices. It's one of the few social services that essentially works just as effectively on your phone as on the web interface (even some natively mobile social services have a disparity between what you can do in the mobile app versus what you can do in the browser). That puts Twitter out ahead of the pack of burgeoning (or trying to burgeon...) mobile social services like foursquare and brightkite, in part because the simplicity everyone is so quick to decry makes it abundantly usable on the go.

The other benefit is global accessibility. SMS is a technology known and used around the world, ensuring Twitter's availability practically everywhere without having to overcome issues other web apps may typically face, from censorship to outright blocking to technological incompatibilities. We witnessed one manifestation of the power this affords during the recent Iran elections.

The mass proliferation of Twitter clients too has been in part thanks to its simplicity. There are no messy formatting standards to contend with and display, no rich media incompatibilities to overcome, no surprising paginations or blinking tags — just 140 characters of text in any given update. Not only does that make it easier for a developer to whip up an app, it also makes our eyes happier.

Short is Not the Death of Long

Much like every new communication technology has prompted dire prognostication about the inevitable demise of the Old Ways, there is no shortage of punditry regarding Twitter's hastening the decline of civilization. Won't our children's brains be malformed if they only ever have to come up with 140 character chunks? Won't SMS abbreviations and LOLspeak be the death of language as we know it?

Just like TV didn't kill radio and the internet hasn't (yet) killed the printed word, neither will short kill long. Status updates and long-form reflections are not mutually exclusive, and both have a place in the human communication buffet. If anything, the short form turns out to be an extremely effective distribution method for the long.

And as for chatspeak, there's an argument to be made that subversion of the language requires some level of mastery of the language. If we imagine these short forms as essentially dialects, then research on multiple language-speakers might be brought in to back up the idea that being fluent in two or more sets of communication "codes" can strengthen, not endanger, one's ability to process language.

Short bursts of communication also provide a key element of what is actually "conversational" — in real life, people aren't standing about at cocktail parties spewing off full blog posts and waiting for onlookers to submit comments. It's a back and forth exchange, typically in short bursts. And if someone violates this social norm by excessively soliloquizing, we label them "a bit of a talker" or at worst, downright rude — someone to potentially avoid. And though it's dangerous to start attaching the label "pointless" to short, less than earth-shattering statements, we as a species actually derive value from those short connecting segments of conversation. Even the pointless babble can nonetheless establish and re-establish ties with people we care about.

I've stated a case for Twitter's 140 character limit, and would love to hear your feedback. Technological constraints are nothing new, and it's my feeling that the imposed brevity makes Twitter a nicer place to hang around. What do you think? Would Twitter be twice at good if Ev and Biz would only raise the level cap to 280? Let us know in the comments!

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